NYPD will scrap 36,000 Windows Phones for iPhones

The New York Police Department will scrap the 36,000 Windows Phones it bought for cops over the past two years and replace them with iPhones, a new report claims.

The first iPhones will be introduced just two months after the last Windows Phone was handed out, the New York Post reports. The Windows Phones were introduced as part of a $160 million initiative that Mayor Bill de Blasio referred to as “a huge step into the 21st century.”

The thin blue screen

The decision to adopt Windows Phones was met with skepticism from the start, due to the fact that Microsoft’s mobile OS is found on just 2.3 percent of U.S. smartphones — compared to 65.2 percent for Android and 30.9 percent for iOS. The two models the NYPD bought included 2014’s Lumia 830 and 2015’s Lumia 640XL.

Adopting the Microsoft handsets was apparently the decision of NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Information Technology Jessica Tisch, who “drove the whole process.” The decision is said to have been linked to the fact that Microsoft software is already used to run the NYPD’s video surveillance program at its Lower Manhattan Security Initiative Command Center.

“She’s a terror if she doesn’t get her way, so I usually let her get her way,” then-NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton joked in October 2014. “So she’s certainly getting her way with this technology.”